Jorge Jácome film selected for festival in the United States

The film ‘Past Perfect’ by the Portuguese director Jorge Jácome was selected for the New Directors / New Films festival, which starts on March 27 in New York, United States of America, was announced today.

The festival, which will mark the 48th edition, is organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Lincoln Center film club and “celebrates filmmakers who represent the present and who anticipate the future of cinema, bold artists whose work dares enter by unexpected paths, “reads the press release.

This year, the program will feature 24 feature films and 11 short films, including “Past Perfect”, which the director Jorge Jácome debuted this month in competition at the Berlin Film Festival.

‘Past Perfect’ derives from the play ‘Antes’, by Pedro Penim, in which Jorge Jácome had worked the visual component. The director rewrote the original text, adapting it to his personal interrogations and the cinematographic context.

In spite of having done several works during the time in which he studied in the Superior School of Theater and Cinema, Jorge Jácome considers himself to be the director from ‘Pluto’, the short film of 2013. After that, he did the short films’ A guest + a host = a Ghost ‘(2015),’ Fieste Forever ‘(2017) and’ Flores’ (2017).

Jorge Jacome then presents “Past Perfect” as “a balance sheet and a point of the situation” about what he does and where he wants to follow in cinema, based on this perception of the origin of melancholy, he said in an interview.

“Melancholia, for me, is a much more individual and personal thing, so it is so difficult to explain. And this ‘Past Perpect’ is constantly saying that it is difficult to explain, to translate, to move to images and to text what is this feeling, “he said.

Born in Viana do Castelo in 1988, he grew up in Macao, until the administrative transfer of the territory to China in 1999. Back in Portugal, he studied at the Superior School of Theater and Cinema, without having certain ideas that he wanted to follow cinema.

“What was exciting was that in school I learned for the first time to watch movies and to watch movies that I did not have access to, I really learned everything from scratch, I was not a movie buff before going to school,” he recalled.

He then went to France for a postgraduate degree at Le Fesnoy, where he learned to deconstruct the earlier teachings.

The New Directors / New Films festival, which opens with Chinonye Chukwu’s ‘Clemency’, runs from March 27 to April 7.